Christine McHorse was born 1948 in Morenci, AZ. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM from 1963-1968. McHorse has received numerous awards from the SWAIA Indian Market, Santa Fe and the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, Gallup, as well as Museum of Northern Arizona. Her work is included in the collections of the Denver Museum of Natural History; Museum of New Mexico; National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution; Navajo Nation Museum; Rockwell Museum of Western Art. McHorse is a first generation, full-blooded Navajo ceramic artist. She married Joel McHorse, a Taos Pueblo Indian, and learned to make pots through his grandmother, Lena Archuleta, who taught her to work with micaceous clay, a rare, but naturally occurring clay high in mica content that can be found in the Taos area. McHorse has since become one of the most admired and successful Native potters, working with traditional techniques but making the kind of reductive, sculptural pots that one would have expected Brancusi to make, were he alive today. McHorse has the unique distinction of winning numerous awards for both pottery and sculpture at the annual Santa Fe Indian Market. (SOURCE: Peters Projects, http://www.petersprojects.com/christine-mchorse/, accessed 5/4/18)
McHorse's work has an elegance and sophistication that defy stereotypes about folk art and traditional Native American art. McHorse began to make traditional Navajo pottery when she was in her late twenties. Having grown up off the reservation, she was introduced to the pottery craft by Lena Archuleta, her husband's grandmother. A Pueblo Indian from New Mexico's Taos Pueblo, Archuleta taught McHorse to make pots in that community's traditional style, but the younger potter soon learned the Navajo tradition and began to expand on both to develop her own distinctive approach. (SOURCE: Tom Patterson, Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001)
McHorse uses clay from the mountains around Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico, and bases her work on traditional Navajo designs and legends. She uses the traditional technique of coiling to make her pots, by winding strips of clay into a cylinder, then smoothing the surface. To finish her pieces, however, she ignores Navajo taboos by applying imagery to the clay and firing it in an electric kiln (SOURCE: Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia, 1990).
